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Over at the NYT’s Freakonomics blog, Arthur Brooks is reporting on studies that suggest that conservatives are considerably happier than liberals. This is creating considerable agitá among the commentators. The most intelligent response so far has come from the person who wrote, “Who cares? They’re still wrong.” But I’m enjoying the several folks who denounce the study as dependent on “self-assessment” and “self-reporting,” that is, who think that people who say that they’re happy are not to be trusted any more than (I suppose) people who say that they’re honest or smart.

This raises an interesting question: If I cannot be trusted to determine whether I’m happy or not, who can? To whom should I turn if I want to know whether or not I’m happy? I’d really like to know.

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I’m glad to hear you say this, Alan. I got into a big argument with Megan McArdle and her commenters when she, evidence-free, declared that academics are embittered, angry people. I pointed out that most of the academics that I know are very happy, and another commenter actually posted survey data saying the same. But I was shouted down by McArdle’s commenters, who seemed determined to argue by assertion that academics are, in fact, filled with bitterness and rage.

Freddie: Yeah, I saw that thread, and it wasn’t pretty. We academics have our complaints, of course, but how does that make us different than anyone else? As you say, the actual data support the view that academics by and large like our jobs and don’t want to trade them in for another line of work . . . but hey, let’s not let the facts get in the way of popular imagery, okay?

Isn’t the issue about where self-assessment and interpersonal comparisons come together? It’s consistent to think that you can make good judgments about your own happiness but that there’s no straightforward way to compare them with other people’s judgments and aggregate them. I don’t know how that relates to this particular study or even the methodological issues surrounding happiness research in general, so I’m not going to say that’s the case.

Actually, I think Brooks (and I’m basing this on a talk I heard him give a while back) relies on studies that show people’s self-perceptions of happiness pretty closely match the perceptions of those around them. So if you ask someone “Are you generally happy?” and then ask those who know you (family, friends, coworkers) “Is he generally happy?” the answers tend to match up remarkably well. So asking people if they are happy seems like a pretty decent way of going about it.

This may seem remarkable, but when conducting an evaluation of a client, one of the most effective ways to assess for depression is to ask, “Are you depressed?” There are a couple of other follow-up questions, but really, that usually nails it. Amazing, isn’t it?

1) ignorance. is it bliss?
2) is there a positive correlation between not examining the self and not examining government policy/society?
3) is general happiness among liberals being depressed due to essentially 12 years (or 20+ depending on how you view the first clinton administration) of conservative dominated government?

i’m sure there are many other factors that come into play beyond these. and although i agree that it creates quite the conundrum if you cannot be trusted about your own happiness, i think that a quick poll of therapists would reveal a weak relationship between initial reported happiness and the day-to-day happiness in peoples’ lives.

It seems to me to matter quite a lot whether what Michael Simpson says is true. If I am the only possible authority on the question of my happiness, then it doesn’t seem to be a state worth – or, perhaps, even capable of being – talked about, much less made the object of scientific study. But if first- and third-personal judgments about happiness tend to square, then – while this does leave room for some error – there’s reason to think that one’s judgments about her own happiness are both substantive and generally trustworthy.

Happiness being a subjective state, I cannot see how anything other than self-assessment is possible. By nature of the question, it’s a qualitative study. Using others’ perceptions to see if they square with a self-assessment isn’t terribly useful. Take the reverse: “Are you depressed?” In the context of an anonymous survey, perhaps the honest answer would be “yes.” However, to those that know him or her, the respondent projects a mask of confidence or happiness, causing them to return an answer of “no.”

I’m not seeing any breakdown in income and other factors, so wouldn’t it be reasonable to think the causal direction goes the other way—happy people become conservative?

But to the question raised here, if there is a social convention among conservatives that one is always to claim to be happy, then we shouldn’t trust their self-reporting any more than we would trust the self-reporting of someone with a gun aimed at their head.

I meant those three quotes to question the whole idea of a survey asking whether people are happy or not.

But on another level, I think they also suggest a critique of the specific methodology of the survey. It seems possible that when asked “Are you happy?”, liberals might be more likely than conservatives to question the whole idea of happiness. Even if there’s no real difference on average between the emotional well-being of liberals and conservatives, they might have very different ideas about what it means to be “happy.”

Surely self-reporting is a necessary but inadequate metric (since it may reflect truth but also self-deception, conformity to real or perceived questioner suggestion, or any number of other influences). I would propose asking people whether they are happy before and after they are exposed to 1) experiences or narratives of others that explore alternate interpretations of similar lifestyles and circumstances to their own (to see if others’ experiences resonate more than their own prior self-assessments), and 2) that explore lifestyles and circumstances different from their own to see if they still experience their chosen goals and values in the same way afterward.

I used to be a liberal, but I got over it. As I became more conservative (I doubt I would go so far as to call myself A conservative), I got happier. Here’s why.

Liberals see the world as a series of truly catastrophic problems. They also think these problems could be solved, completely and for all time, with a sufficient application of collective will. They can’t bring this collective will about all by themselves, though, so they sit and stew. Result = unhappiness. In short, liberals can’t really be happy unless everyone else is a liberal too, so they get to impose the big solutions. This is unlikely to happen.

Conservatives also have a dark view of some areas of life, but the picture is more mixed. Some things are bad, and some are good. Similarly, the conservative view of whether problems can be solved is mixed as well. Some problems can be solved, and some cannot. Most important, some can be solved by individuals and small groups. This makes it possible to bite off an amount that a normal person can chew. Result = happiness. Not nirvana or save-the-world bliss, but just the everyday kind of happiness that you get by digging in, being useful, and seeing incremental progress.

This doesn’t require that everyone become conservative, but it does require some checks on the liberal project of running large areas of life through the state. Most conservatives think the government should do SOME things… it’s just a matter of looking very hard at what those might be. Liberals look to the state solution reflexively, and there’s enough historical data now to show that it doesn’t always work.